Being interviewed on The Graham Norton Show, Reese Witherspoon opened up about performing her civic duty: attending jury duty. But where most prefer to opt out, Witherspoon recalled the past experience that taught her the importance of serving on a jury.
"Listen, I did not want to do jury duty," Witherspoon admitted. "But I remember it was probably seven years after Legally Blonde, I got called for jury duty and it was in Beverly Hills. I thought, ‘Surely they’re not gonna pick me.' They picked me for a long trial, y'all. It was probably two weeks."
But fellow guest Will Ferrell, was not impressed by that timeline.
“That’s not that long,” he commented, to which Witherspoon replied, “Okay, Ferrell.”
Ferrell continued, “I thought you were going to say a month.”
“No listen, it was two solid weeks every day going in," Witherspoon defended. She added that the "dog bite case" was very clear and she quickly found herself deeply invested in the conflict. "And then we went to deliberation and so at the very end they say, ‘Okay, well somebody in this group has to be the foreman.' And they all unanimously are like, 'Her,'" Witherspoon recalled, pointing at herself.
The actress was shocked and didn't understand why they singled her out. When she asked her fellow jurors, it became clear that Elle Woods was to blame: "They were like, 'You went to law school.'"
Witherspoon was scandalized. "I was like, ‘Y’all this is really upsetting. I definitely did not go to law school, I didn’t finish college,'" she said. "I played a lawyer in a movie once but they fully made me the foreman and I started realizing… people don’t know much about the law."
Encouraging everyone to participate in jury duty when called upon, she continued, "Some bad stuff goes down in there. They were like, 'I think she's guilty 'cause I don't like the way she looked.' And that was very troubling. I was like, 'You can't say that. We don't have enough evidence!'"